1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to improving user experience on a network, and more specifically, to monitoring bandwidth consumption of the many devices connected to a given node in the network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, have become prevalent in recent years. Given the fast advance in mobile computing power and far-reaching wireless Internet access, more and more users view streamed videos on their mobile devices. The detection of network congestion has become increasingly important for network operators attempting to maximize user experience on the network. Even as network operators are ever increasing the capacity of their networks, the demand for bandwidth is growing at an even faster pace. Managing network growth and dealing with congestion in the infrastructure is particularly important in the mobile space because of the high cost of radio spectrum and radio access network (RAN) equipment utilized by wireless mobile networks. These high costs prevent mobile service providers from engineering excess capacity into each network access point through the purchase of additional RAN infrastructure. The same situation can, however, also happens to other types of network infrastructure.
Existing network elements can give operators a view into the current state of traffic in their network, but they do not provide a measure of “goodness,” i.e., how much elasticity is left or how much more data can the network handle. This measure is important for multimedia content delivery since a good user experience usually depends on the network's ability to deliver data in a reliable and sustainable fashion. A minimum data rate is required to prevent stalling and re-buffering during the streaming of multimedia content, hence ensuring sufficient bandwidth is important to quality of experience. Typically, multimedia content providers are sufficiently equipped to deliver multimedia content at levels far beyond the capabilities of wireless infrastructure. Hence, the burden falls on wireless service providers to implement network data optimization to ease the traffic burden and maximize the experience of each and every user on the network. Currently, however, mobile service providers are often forced to use very coarse tools that have little visibility into which network segments are congested and tend to apply optimization to flows that may not need any optimization.
Typically, mobile service providers use inline network appliances that monitor every bit of subscriber traffic in order to make estimates of network throughput. This puts a huge burden on the system since it must scale to handle hundreds of thousands to millions of network requests per second through a single network access point. Furthermore, network service providers often must utilize these monitoring techniques on a micro-scale (e.g., per RAN equipment installation) in order to react to the condition of the network, which results in increased cost. In addition, a large portion of web traffic consists of small object requests, which can obscure network monitoring at any level due to their short lifetime and bursty characteristics.